When would you say that x86 computers became "black boxes"?

RetroComputingCollector said:
When do you think x86 computers became "black boxes" that are no longer yours to work with and own? I would say it was when the Intel ME and AMD PSP were introduced. I think the state of modern consumer computing is terrifying. The ironic thing is that the IBM PC architecture succeeded because it was open.
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I agree with your sentiment about modern consumer computing - closed off, non-reproducible wall garden systems for smart devices and such.

However I do not agree with examples given. Management Engine is simply server technology that got introduced in desktop space when every server on the planet earth came with baseboard management controller. People (like me) building servers out of desktop mainboards always wanted remote management capabilities. I remember getting first Q35 board and I was so excited I could power on my computer remotely and boot it with passwords - you know the same deal you would be doing if you deploy an encrypted server on someone's hosting - you would trust the SSL channel of the remote management console, as I trusted my VPN router channel, and then access the remote management under local network conditions.

Simply put ME is an iteration of WoL. And WoL is not going to help you if OS wont come up. Baseboard management takes care of this problem. Without it, server management as we know it would not exist.

What ME did that irked people out was just regular thing when being implemented on 'cheap' mainboards - using a sole NIC for Ethernet and management. On server-class boards the ME interface is separate.

However I have not seen proof of rogue behaviour by ME/AMT, DRAC, iLO, PSP on the network. Same with Huawei or Chinese devices. 10 years ago craze about them because they started to push Cisco out of the market (Cisco was always too exepensive anyway). Nobody put out proof that routers aren't just routing per rules but doing something rogue too.

Tangential, but a "NSA key" was found in Windows sources. Everyone immediately started saying NSA has access to your data and this is the encryption key they use. I won't even mention how finding a static value in the memory and getting a hardware trap every time the address is accessed is relatively easy with proper gear, hardcoding an encrpytion key in the sources is something a national security agency of medieval Kongo would know not to do.

WoL is possible because of ATX and power states. And here we get to the culprit - something that was annoying me decades ago, but I just learned to live with it - unless plugged out, the computer is on. There is no physical power switch for the mainboard any more - only in some cases on the PSU.

If the power isn't exactly power but just a state machine, an error, exploit in the platform could be used too.
 
For example these are officially undocumented/proprietary parts on the mainboard of my 1986 XT computer :

1. A PC-BUS integrated controller "Faraday FE2000". This is ASIC chip of unknown schematics that integrates serveral Intel and 74LS XT architecture "parts" like clock generation, waitstates, PC speaker and such. It does sit on data paths for register IO and it is able to interrupt the CPU, delay memory ops, etc.

2. A CGA-type video generator Paradise PVC2. Alike the upper chip this one intergrates smaller documented chips in an undocumented design. It has read access to video memory and directly drives the CRT monitor inners.

3. Several PAL chips scattered throughout. Their combinatorial logic can be reversed, but it is still a closed component.

So in this case Olivetti went to integrate IBM PC XT design on a higher level. Reason - this Olivetti mainboard has entire XT mainboard + graphics card + serial + parallel on a footprint of XT mainboard, thus a lot of smaller chips had to be replaced with highly integrated chips. When doing so, the 'user' is brought to a higher abstraction and loses the capacity to fix the XT PC by anaylzing simple 74LS components and Intel-esque DIL chips that make up XT arch.

The new highly integrated components expose the same control signals as whole small chip circuits they replace. Therefore 'users' never saw the inner design of these and expect them to work on a black box principle.

Electronic debugging of this graphics card is much harder than IBM CGA because the latter is made from simple components + 6845-type character generator. This card adds a custom video gate array and 4 PAL chips to that, none documented, complicating everything a lot.

Technically, you could use a rogue video generator design to fry someone's monitor (maybe even damage person's hearing in the process) that triggers only when specific value in video memory was found. This would be impossible to do on IBM CGA because the only big IC it uses is the abundantly tested and documented 6845.

However if you ran around in 1986 with that story people would see you as conspiracy theory freak. But time has proven otherwise.

Point of my post is that we went on to higher abstraction for a good cause but this enabled some shady corporate behavior down the line.
 
I'm thinking whenever stuff like race conditions started; actions should either happen or not, no "sometimes" with 1s and 0s.

Stuff like this makes KDE sound like it's powered by RNG :p

darth said:
...However, when I start SDDM manually sometimes it happens that after I login for the second time I can no longer crash my Plasma session via crtl+c and I can no longer switch to VT at all. Like I lost the ability to run system shortcuts. Also when my desktop session is like this then I can NOT see any shutdown/reboot/sleep buttons in KDE start menu. Only logout option is shown. Also I can put my laptop to sleep (as root via CLI) while in this state and resume it and it works fine and it resumes my Plasma session.
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Oh nice! I've had no clue that you can cross-post-quote someone. Speaking of RNG, my ThinkPad T480 OpenBSD install sometimes boots-up with one cpu core permanently at 100% and sometimes it boots up fine. Also when waking up from sleep the RNG dice throw happens again.

However unlike with Plasma Wayland issue, the thing with OpenBSD has been long known and the workaround is to disable Thunderbolt. 🤷‍♂️

But speaking of black boxes - who of you had an Amiga? I remember that computer having a complete hardware instructions manual. There was literally nothing blackboxy about Amiga except maybe the Kickstart?
 
darth said:
Oh nice! I've had no clue that you can cross-post-quote someone. Speaking of RNG, my ThinkPad T480 OpenBSD install sometimes boots-up with one cpu core permanently at 100% and sometimes it boots up fine. Also when waking up from sleep the RNG dice throw happens again.

However unlike with Plasma Wayland issue, the thing with OpenBSD has been long known and the workaround is to disable Thunderbolt. 🤷‍♂️

But speaking of black boxes - who of you had an Amiga? I remember that computer having a complete hardware instructions manual. There was literally nothing blackboxy about Amiga except maybe the Kickstart?
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I think that vermaden had Amiga. When I already mentioned him, please check his The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management, and bunch of other articles related to ThinkPad

BTW, Amiga vs Atari ST Thread 99150
 
How can ME be a security risk if, for example, the client machine that has ME is behind a layer 3 firewall like opnsense that runs on a machine that has no ME on it. Im genuinely curious. Is it possible to spy on it at osi leyer 2, or am i missing something ?
 
The ME and counterparts are partly to bootstrap the whole chip. Like, get the components online one by my one, maybe managing defective parts. The alpha had a way to skip defective cache lines, for example. You can do that with custom logic or some low performance core like an 386. Because somewhere along the line me you will come to at least one bootstrap (as in pulling yourself out of the swamp) moment where you have a deadlock. A separate core solves that. But that core has, by definition, access to all hardware. And what you can do with that, when highjacked - is everything.
 
The original PC lost a central element of it's open architecture when the ISA/EISA bus was replaced with PCI. Before PCI, you could fairly easily make your own hardware to add in to the expansion slots. After PCI, that became more difficult, and (much) more difficult again when pci switched from a parallel bus to the serial pci-e bus. This loss has been partly mitigated by the availability of usb interface chips, but usb is not as direct an interface as onto the machine bus itself. Other changes that made the architecture less open including the change from bios to uefi, secure boot, trusted computing and the ME. However... the x86 pc is still the most open architecture out there. I can still get a reference design from intel, licence an off-the-shelf bios from companies like AMI, and start to manufacture my own pc clones, and get software compatibility with existing operating systems, there isn't really any other platform that applies to. Having said that, the barriers to entry are probably higher now than they used to be. Another major factor making the architecture less open has been Microsoft taking control of defining what should be in a PC to qualify it to run windows. The closing of the architecture has been a slow progression of different stages over time; but in my view the first major step was replacing (E)ISA with the PCI bus, back around 1995, and then pci-e later.

It's interesting that the ISA bus (and PCI bus) lives on today in industrial PC's, because of the ease with which add-on cards can be developed by end users and small specialised interface hardware developers.
 
blackbird9 said:
It's interesting that the ISA bus (and PCI bus) lives on today in industrial PC's, because of the ease with which add-on cards can be developed by end users and small specialised interface hardware developers.
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Same goes for rs232 ports. There are manufacturers out there that make embedded systems that have 6 or more com ports. Some technologies just cant be replaced. To make it even more interesting, my asus z790 motherboard, which is pretty recent, has rs232 header port. I just bought a bracket with ribbon cable, attached it to motherboard header, and use it as serial device to access console port on my firewall. It works flawlessly.

Also, recent z690 motherboards from msi support coreboot open source bios. And intel management engine can be disabled with me_cleaner. There is a lot of open x86 hardware out there.
 
blackbird9 said:
The original PC lost a central element of it's open architecture when the ISA/EISA bus was replaced with PCI.
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Between ISA and PCI lies VLB that extended ISA to 32-bit access and 25+ MHz bus operation. With such an ISA extension, realizing simple hardware is no longer possible. ISA runs specifically at 8 MHz to allow the simple access logic on cards to transition in time. For this reason you cannot drive old computers to CPU speed unless it is 8 MHz and below, your ISA cards will start to fail even if memory bus can ensure enough waitstates for RAM and VRAM to cope with the speed. The latches for the register IO won't respond in time.

Why was extension necessary? Due to PC's CPU speed and 32-bit capabilities now entering workstation space, graphics bandwidth and capabilities had to follow. (also braindead to have 32-bit CPU and 16-bit bus only platform)

VLB allowed 16-bit motherboards to add on a 32-bit capability. As chip making prices were falling down steeply, 32 bit bus was soon an attractive thing for affordable network cards, sound cards, storage controllers...so came PCI.

So either PC stays frozen in time, and accessible for tinkerers, or it follows the trend of technological evolution. Besides I don't think that's what open architecture is about. Accessible doesn't equate to open in this case, in my view.

Closed architecture is what IBM tried to did with PS/2 - the standardisation of PC BUS and AT BUS into ISA was industry response to that fiasco.
 
I guess we can say that the PC diverged into two branches... one towards the sophisticated graphics workstation market that is nowadays somewhat disparagingly called "the desktop", the other towards control and embedded (and perhaps a third specifically aimed at the games market). Interesting points, I'd forgotton about VLB. I still think the PC is the best thing that happened to computer hardware in decades, in terms of commoditising the hardware and democratising access. The PC architecture is still to a large extent 'open'.

As for IBM, they basically wrecked their own PC business with their attempt to return the PC to a closed proprietary architecture; that horse had already left the stable and was galloping away from them at 1000 mph. Although how they couldn't make money on thinkpads is beyond me, I guess there just wasn't enough margin in that business for them, but I think it lost them a huge amount of brand recognition when they sold it to Lenovo. Those machines, fitted with the IBM logo, used to be seen in every company boardroom around the world... however many millions would you have to spend on advertising to get that kind of brand recognition...
 
The OP spoke about the ME, and I agree this is about the point-in-time where things became strange. It is one thing to keep your cutting-edge technology closed for your own inverstment protection, it is another thing if you want control over what your customers do with your stuff.

But my concern is not so much computers becoming black boxes, it is rather the internet as a whole becoming a black box. The infrastructure consolidates into a small number of global players who tend to shape things "in their image", and the old tradition of having agreements on the technically most favorable interoperable options is likewise going away. The smartphone as the preferred platform for the multitude of users is already entirely out of our influence, and nobody bothers about that. Connectivity is now run "as-a-service" by others, and all you need to do is touch a button and pay. As long as that works for the majority, things are fine - and if it happens not to work for you specifically, for some strange and spurious reason, well, then you can't pay and have to starve - and that's your problem then.
 
PMc said:
The OP spoke about the ME, and I agree this is about the point-in-time where things became strange. It is one thing to keep your cutting-edge technology closed for your own inverstment protection, it is another thing if you want control over what your customers do with your stuff.

But my concern is not so much computers becoming black boxes, it is rather the internet as a whole becoming a black box. The infrastructure consolidates into a small number of global players who tend to shape things "in their image", and the old tradition of having agreements on the technically most favorable interoperable options is likewise going away. The smartphone as the preferred platform for the multitude of users is already entirely out of our influence, and nobody bothers about that. Connectivity is now run "as-a-service" by others, and all you need to do is touch a button and pay. As long as that works for the majority, things are fine - and if it happens not to work for you specifically, for some strange and spurious reason, well, then you can't pay and have to starve - and that's your problem then.
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I agree, but the Old World of Networking still exists in enterprise enviroments. Private stuff for the average individual is too far gone, but I talked to someone from a financial firm that says that they use a self-hosted FTP server instead of "the cloud". Buisnesses actually have a strong incentive to avoid modern crap because SaaSS puts their proprietary info at risk, and risks their customer's personal info too. The person I talked to also said they got a special contract with Microsoft so their PCs don't collect your buisness data for AI training. Their servers run some UNIX implementation (they couldn't disclose which one) but their provided PCs run some mysterious de-enshittified Windows.
 
vermaden said:
When Intel introduced ME (Management Engine) and AMD introduced PSP (Platform Security Processor).
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Intel ME could be removed completely (iirc prior to 6), and HAP-bit disabled afaik up to gen 12. AMD PSP is the real copy-cat mysterious black box :p (AMD can somehow justify it without any kind of HAP-bit or optional disable)


I'd say motherboard firmware in-general though; I have an iBook G4, and Open Firmware ("open" right in the name :p) even with fun stuff like boot usb0/disk@1:3, is more open and understandable on Apple hardware than anything I've seen X86 BIOS and UEFI, even Libre/Coreboot.
 
Espionage724 said:
Intel ME could be removed completely (iirc prior to 6), and HAP-bit disabled afaik up to gen 12. AMD PSP is the real copy-cat mysterious black box :p (AMD can somehow justify it without any kind of HAP-bit or optional disable)
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It probably wasn't so much in the realm of what would be needed to be justified as it was "AMD, do this or the FBI is coming, and if you do it, then we will pay you". With the recent nationalization of Intel, it is clear that they (the government obviously) are hellbent on taking away any sembalence of freedom and privacy, even in your own home. The backdoors in all PCs just takes this PATRIOT Act nightmare to a wholw new level. I bet there's stuff they're doing that we have no idea about and that would be appalling to learn about. I wouldn't be surprised if there were bugs in all of our cars. In fact, I already know they are recording our GPS data because that's part of how they caught the guy that started the Palisades Fire. I might sound like a conspiracy wackjob, but with the Epstein files, MILITARY DEPLOYMENTS IN US CITIES, and other awful things happening, it feels like every conspiracy theory is coming true at once.
 
Espionage724 said:
Intel ME could be removed completely (iirc prior to 6), and HAP-bit disabled afaik up to gen 12. AMD PSP is the real copy-cat mysterious black box :p (AMD can somehow justify it without any kind of HAP-bit or optional disable)


I'd say motherboard firmware in-general though; I have an iBook G4, and Open Firmware ("open" right in the name :p) even with fun stuff like boot usb0/disk@1:3, is more open and understandable on Apple hardware than anything I've seen X86 BIOS and UEFI, even Libre/Coreboot.
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Yep. We can all fight all that bullshit. The question is - why we have to in the first place?
 
cracauer@ said:
Well, it's about to get worse with some features on newest Intel CPUs needing binary userspace blobs:

Intel's Open-Source Strategy Is Changing At Odds With The Ethos Of Open-Source - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com www.phoronix.com
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Someone could reverse engineer it, like Noveau is doing with Nvidia cards. And the ME is still on your computer, in your posession. If something is in your house, no matter how locked down it is, it's still possible to have at least some control over it. They try as hard as they can to stop us, but it isn't really truly possible. Their next move will probably be trying to make the chipsets network dependent by fetching the rom off of the network, which will still be foiled. Their master plan will probably be to get rid of all PCs and replace them with terminals connecting into a master control center, so everything is a service. I still will not stop fighting!
 
RetroComputingCollector said:
And the ME is still on your computer, in your posession. If something is in your house, no matter how locked down it is, it's still possible to have at least some control over it.
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Afaik US Gov was the reason for HAP bit, I don't see HECI or any PCI ME devices, and Intel ME tools nor Linux can see ME. I'm satisfied it's disabled enough from user-space :p

But even if ME was still able to do something, it's probably easier to snoop from the OS, some tiny binary in mouse or keyboard firmware, HDMI ends on random cables, GPU drivers and HDCP (probably easier to GPU snoop with everything being ran GPU-accelerated as some push even though CPU is faster with stuff like Discord and Blizzard Bnet client), or anyone using a seemingly-disconnected smart TV with a wifi card as a computer monitor; ME's the least of my concern :p Even video games do snooping (Valorent; even unsuspecting ones in random updates like Guild Wars 2 and osu!)
 
The point of ME, the public facing part, is that it is of no concern what OS is running. The ME is even active when S3 is entered, and it can affect timing of components on the chip. And it completely bypasses the memory management of any OS running, without a trace. Doesn't sound much untill you see reports of passwords for servers being morse-code imprinted onto the time span between network packets. The ME, as in a small core roping it all together, was present before this IMHO.
 
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